The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Read online

  “The suicides all started about a month after Crosstime got started. I think one of the Crosstime ships brought back a new bug from some alternate timeline.”

  “A suicide bug?”

  Bentley nodded.

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I don’t think so. Gene, do you know how many Crosstime pilots have killed themselves in the last year? More than twenty percent!”

  “Oh?”

  “Look at the records. Crosstime has about twenty vehicles in action now, but in the past year they’ve employed sixty-two pilots. Three disappeared. Fifteen are dead, and all but two died by suicide.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Trimble was shaken.

  “It was bound to happen sometime. Look at the alternate worlds they’ve found so far. The Nazi world. The Red Chinese world, half bombed to death. The ones that are so totally bombed, that Crosstime can’t even find out who did it. The one with the Black Plague mutation, and no penicillin until Crosstime came along. Sooner or later—”

  “Maybe, maybe. I don’t buy your bug, though. If the suicides are a new kind of plague, what about the other crimes?”

  “Same bug.”

  “Uh uh. But I think we’ll check up on Crosstime.”

  TRIMBLE’S HANDS FINISHED with the gun and laid it on the desk. He was hardly aware of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind was a prodding sensation: the handle, the piece he needed to solve the puzzle.

  He’d spent most of the day studying Crosstime, Inc. News stories, official handouts, personal interviews. The incredible suicide rate among Crosstime pilots could not be coincidence. He wondered why nobody had noticed it before.

  It was slow going. With Crosstime travel, as with relativity, you had to throw away reason and use only logic. Trimble had sweated it out. Even the day’s murders had not distracted him.

  They were typical, of a piece with the preceding eight months’ crime wave. A man had shot his foreman with a gun bought an hour earlier, then strolled off toward police headquarters. A woman had moved through the back row of a dark theater, using an ice pick to stab members of the audience through the backs of their seats. She had chosen only young men. They had killed without heat, without concealment; they had surrendered without fear or bravado. Perhaps it was another kind of suicide.

  Time for coffee, Trimble thought, responding unconsciously to dry throat plus a muzziness in the mouth plus slight fatigue. He set his hands to stand up, and—

  The image came to him of an endless row of Trimbles, lined up like the repeated images in facing mirrors. But each image was slightly different. He would go get the coffee and he wouldn’t and he would send somebody for it and someone was about to bring it without being asked. Some of the images were drinking coffee, a few had tea or milk, some were smoking, some were leaning too far back with their feet on the desks (and a handful of these were toppling helplessly backward), some were, like this present Trimble, introspecting with their elbows on the desk.

  Damn Crosstime anyway.

  He’d have had to check Harmon’s business affairs, even without the Crosstime link. There might have been a motive there, for suicide or for murder, though it had never been likely.

  In the first place, Harmon had cared nothing for money. The Crosstime group had been one of many. At the time that project had looked as harebrained as the rest: a handful of engineers and physicists and philosophers determined to prove that the theory of alternate time tracks was reality.

  In the second place, Harmon had no business worries.

  Quite the contrary.

  Eleven months ago an experimental vehicle had touched one of the worlds of the Confederate States of America, and returned. The universes of alternate choice were within reach. And the pilot had brought back an artifact.

  From that point on, Crosstime travel had more than financed itself. The Confederate world’s “stapler,” granted an immediate patent, had bought two more ships. A dozen miracles had originated in a single, technologically advanced timeline, one in which the catastrophic Cuba War had been no more than a wet firecracker. Lasers, oxygen-hydrogen rocket motors, computers, strange plastics—the list was still growing. And Crosstime held all the patents.

  In those first months the vehicles had gone off practically at random. Now the pinpointing was better. Vehicles could select any branch they preferred. Imperial Russia, Amerindian America, the Catholic Empire, the dead worlds. Some of the dead worlds were hells of radioactive dust and intact but deadly artifacts. From these worlds Crosstime pilots brought strange and beautiful works of art which had to be stored behind leaded glass.

  The latest vehicles could reach worlds so like this one that it took a week of research to find the difference. In theory they could get even closer. There was a phenomenon called “the broadening of the bands.” . . .

  And that had given Trimble the shivers.

  When a vehicle left its own present, a signal went on in the hangar, a signal unique to that ship. When the pilot wanted to return, he simply cruised across the appropriate band of probabilities until he found the signal. The signal marked his own unique present.

  Only it didn’t. The pilot always returned to find a clump of signals, a broadened band. The longer he stayed away, the broader was the signal band. His own world had continued to divide after his departure, in a constant stream of decisions being made both ways.

  Usually it didn’t matter. Any signal the pilot chose represented the world he had left. And since the pilot himself had a choice, he naturally returned to them all. But—

  There was a pilot by the name of Gary Wilcox. He had been using his vehicle for experiments, to see how close he could get to his own timeline and still leave it. Once, last month, he had returned twice.

  Two Gary Wilcoxes, two vehicles. The vehicles had been wrecked: their hulls intersected. For the Wilcoxes it could have been sticky, for Wilcox had a wife and family. But one of the duplicates had chosen to die almost immediately.

  Trimble had tried to call the other Gary Wilcox. He was too late. Wilcox had gone skydiving a week ago. He’d neglected to open his parachute.

  Small wonder, thought Trimble. At least Wilcox had had motive. It was bad enough, knowing about the other Trimbles, the ones who had gone home, the ones drinking coffee, et cetera. But—suppose someone walked into the office right now, and it was Gene Trimble?

  It could happen.

  Convinced as he was that Crosstime was involved in the suicides, Trimble (some other Trimble) might easily have decided to take a trip in a Crosstime vehicle. A short trip. He could land here.

  TRIMBLE CLOSED HIS EYES and rubbed at the corners with his fingertips. In some other timeline, very close, someone had thought to bring him coffee. Too bad this wasn’t it.

  It didn’t do to think too much about these alternate timelines. There were too many of them. The close ones could drive you buggy, but the ones further off were just as bad.

  Take the Cuba War. Atomics had been used, here, and now Cuba was uninhabited, and some American cities were gone, and some Russian. It could have been worse.

  Why wasn’t it? How did we luck out? Intelligent statesmen? Faulty bombs? A humane reluctance to kill indiscriminately?

  No. There was no luck anywhere. Every decision was made both ways. For every wise choice you bled your heart out over, you made all the other choices too. And so it went, all through history.

  Civil wars unfought on some worlds were won by either side on others. Elsewhen, another animal had first done murder with an antelope femur. Some worlds were still all nomad; civilization had lost out. If every choice was cancelled elsewhere, why make a decision at all?

  Trimble opened his eyes and saw the gun.

  That gun, too, was endlessly repeated on endless desks. Some of the images were dirty with years of neglect. Some smelled of gunpowder, fired recently, a few at living targets. Some were loaded. All were as real as this one.

  A number of these were about to go off by accid
ent.

  A proportion of these were pointed, in deadly coincidence, at Gene Trimble.

  See the endless rows of Gene Trimble, each at his desk. Some are bleeding and cursing as men run into the room following the sound of the gunshot. Many are already dead.

  Was there a bullet in there? Nonsense.

  He looked away. The gun was empty.

  Trimble loaded it. At the base of his mind he felt the touch of the handle. He would find what he was seeking.

  He put the gun back on his desk, pointing away from him, and he thought of Ambrose Harmon, coming home from a late night. Ambrose Harmon, who had won five hundred dollars at poker. Ambrose Harmon, exhausted, seeing the lightening sky as he prepared for bed. Going out to watch the dawn.

  Ambrose Harmon, watching the slow dawn, remembering a two-thousand-dollar pot. He’d bluffed. In some other branching of time, he had lost.

  Thinking that in some other branching of time that two thousand dollars included his last dime. It was certainly possible. If Crosstime hadn’t paid off, he might have gone through the remains of his fortune in the past four years. He liked to gamble.

  Watching the dawn, thinking of all the Ambrose Harmons on that roof. Some were penniless this night, and they had not come out to watch the dawn.

  Well, why not? If he stepped over the edge, here and now, another Ambrose Harmon would only laugh and go inside.

  If he laughed and went inside, other Ambrose Harmons would fall to their deaths. Some were already on their ways down. One changed his mind too late, another laughed as he fell. . . .

  Well, why not? . . .

  Trimble thought of another man, a nonentity, passing a firearms store. Branching of timelines, he thinks, looking in, and he thinks of the man who took his foreman’s job. Well, why not? . . .

  Trimble thought of a lonely woman making herself a drink at three in the afternoon. She thinks of myriads of alter egos, with husbands, lovers, children, friends. Unbearable, to think that all the might-have-beens were as real as herself. As real as this ice pick in her hand. Well, why not? . . .

  And she goes out to a movie, but she takes the ice pick.

  And the honest citizen with a carefully submerged urge to commit rape, just once. Reading his newspaper at breakfast, and there’s another story from Crosstime: they’ve found a world line in which Kennedy the First was assassinated. Strolling down a street, he thinks of world lines and infinite branchings, of alter egos already dead, or jailed, or President. A girl in a miniskirt passes, and she has nice legs. Well, why not? . . .

  Casual murder, casual suicide, casual crime. Why not? If alternate universes are a reality, then cause and effect are an illusion. The law of averages is a fraud. You can do anything, and one of you will, or did.

  Gene Trimble looked at the clean and loaded gun on his desk. Well, why not? . . .

  And he ran out of the office shouting, “Bentley, listen, I’ve got the answer . . .”

  And he stood up slowly and left the office shaking his head. This was the answer, and it wasn’t any good. The suicides, murders, casual crimes would continue. . . .

  And he suddenly laughed and stood up. Ridiculous! Nobody dies for a philosophical point! . . .

  And he reached for the intercom and told the man who answered to bring him a sandwich and some coffee. . . .

  And picked the gun off the newspapers, looked at it for a long moment, then dropped it in the drawer. His hands began to shake. On a world line very close to this one . . .

  And he picked the gun off the newspapers, put it to his head

  and

  fired. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

  fired. The gun jerked up and blasted a hole in the ceiling.

  fired.

  The bullet tore a furrow in his scalp.

  took off the top of his head.

  Greg Bear

  The topics of Greg Bear’s science fiction have ranged from nanotechnology run amok in Blood Music, to the translation of souls into awesome energy fields in the SF-horror hybrid Psycholone, and future evolution in Darwin’s Radio. He is the author of the Songs of Earth and Power heroic diptych, comprised of The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage, and two collections of short fiction, The Wind from a Burning Woman and Tangents, which include his stories “Hardfought” and “Blood Music,” each of which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Renowned for his hard science-fiction epics, Bear has written the trilogy that includes Legacy, Eon, and Eternity, which features a multiplicity of alternate worlds and timelines accessed through the interior of a hollow asteroid. Novels of equally impressive scope include the alien contact story The Forge of God and its sequel, Anvil of Stars; the nanotechnology opus Queen of Angels, and its follow-up, Slant; and the Nebula Award–winning Moving Mars, which chronicles the fifty-year history of Earth’s Mars colony and its revolt against the mother planet. Bear has also written Dinosaur Summer, a sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Foundation and Chaos, which builds on the concepts of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.

  THROUGH ROAD NO WHITHER

  * * *

  Greg Bear

  THE LONG BLACK MERCEDES rumbled out of the fog on the road south from Dijon, moisture running in cold trickles across its windshield. Horst von Ranke moved the military pouch to one side and carefully read the maps spread on his lap, eyeglasses perched low on his nose, while Waffen Schutzstaffel Oberleutnant Albert Fischer drove. “Thirty-five kilometers,” von Ranke said under his breath. “No more.”

  “We are lost,” Fischer said. “We’ve already come thirty-six.”

  “Not quite that many. We should be there any minute now.”

  Fischer nodded and then shook his head. His high cheekbones and long, sharp nose only accentuated the black uniform with silver death’s heads on the high, tight collar. Von Ranke wore a broad-striped gray suit; he was an undersecretary in the Propaganda Ministry, now acting as a courier. They might have been brothers, yet one had grown up in Czechoslovakia, the other in the Ruhr; one was the son of a coal miner, the other of a brewer. They had met and become close friends in Paris, two years before.

  “Wait,” von Ranke said, peering through the drops on the side window. “Stop.”

  Fischer braked the car and looked in the direction of von Ranke’s long finger. Near the roadside, beyond a copse of young trees, was a low thatch-roofed house with dirty gray walls, almost hidden by the fog.

  “Looks empty,” von Ranke said.

  “It is occupied; look at the smoke,” Fischer said. “Perhaps somebody can tell us where we are.”

  They pulled the car over and got out, von Ranke leading the way across a mud path littered with wet straw. The hut looked even dirtier close up. Smoke rose in a darker brown-gray twist from a hole in the peak of the thatch. Fischer nodded at his friend and they cautiously approached. Over the crude wooden door letters wobbled unevenly in some alphabet neither knew, and between them they spoke nine languages. “Could that be Rom?” von Ranke asked, frowning. “It does look familiar—Slavic Rom.”

  “Gypsies? Romany don’t live in huts like this, and besides, I thought they were rounded up long ago.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” von Ranke said. “Still, maybe we can share some language, if only French.”

  He knocked on the door. After a long pause he knocked again, and the door opened before his knuckles made the final rap. A woman too old to be alive stuck her long, wood-colored nose through the crack and peered at them with one good eye. The other was wrapped in a sunken caul of flesh. The hand that gripped the door edge was filthy, its nails long and black. Her toothless mouth cracked into a wrinkled, round-lipped grin. “Good evening,” she said in perfect, even elegant German. “What can I do for you?”

  “We need to know if we are on the road to Dôle,” von Ranke said, controlling his repulsion.

  “Then you’re asking the wrong guide,” the old woman said. Her hand withdrew and the door started to close. Fischer kicked out and push
ed her back. The door swung open and began to lean on worn-out leather hinges.

  “You do not treat us with the proper respect,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘the wrong guide’? What kind of guide are you?”

  “So strong,” the old woman crooned, wrapping her hands in front of her withered chest and backing away into the gloom. She wore colorless, ageless gray rags. Worn knit sleeves extended to her wrists.

  “Answer me!” Fischer said, advancing despite the strong odor of urine and decay in the hut.

  “The maps I know are not for this land,” she sang, stopping before a cold and empty hearth.

  “She’s crazy,” von Ranke said. “Let the local authorities take care of her later. Let’s be off.” But a wild look was in Fischer’s eye. So much filth, so much disarray, and impudence as well; these made him angry.

  “What maps do you know, crazy woman?” he demanded.

  “Maps in time,” the old woman said. She let her hands fall to her side and lowered her head, as if, in admitting her specialty, she was suddenly humble.

  “Then tell us where we are,” Fischer sneered.

  “Come, we have important business,” von Ranke said, but he knew it was too late. There would be an end, but it would be on his friend’s terms, and it might not be pleasant.

  “You are on a through road no whither,” the old woman said.

  “What?” Fischer towered over her. She stared up as if at some prodigal son returned home, her gums shining spittle.

  “If you wish a reading, sit,” she said, indicating a low table and three battered wood chairs. Fischer glanced at her, then at the table.

  “Very well,” he said, suddenly and falsely obsequious. Another game, von Ranke realized. Cat and mouse.

  Fischer pulled out a chair for his friend and sat across from the old woman. “Put your hands on the table, palms down, both of them, both of you,” she said. They did so. She lay her ear to the table as if listening, eyes going to the beams of light coming through the thatch. “Arrogance,” she said. Fischer did not react.